Uncaught Error/Exception Handling in Swift

Swift has no mechanism to catch all arbitrary runtime exceptions. The reasons are explained in

• [swift-users] "business applications market" flame

in the swift-users forum. Extract:

Swift made a conscious choice not to include exceptions thrown through arbitrary stack frames not because it was technically impossible, but because its designers judged the costs to be too high.

The problem is this: if a piece of code is going to exit early because of an error, it has to be written to handle that early exit. Otherwise it will misbehave—fail to deallocate memory, fail to close file handles/sockets/database connections/whatever, fail to release locks, etc. In a language like Java, writing truly exception-safe code requires a ridiculous quantity of try/finally blocks. That's why nobody does it. They make judgements about which exceptions they're likely to see and which resources are dangerous to leak, and only protect their code against those specific anticipated conditions. Then something unforeseen happens and their program breaks.

This is even worse in a reference-counted language like Swift because correctly balancing the reference counts in the presence of exceptions basically requires every function to include an implicit finally block to balance all the retain counts. This means the compiler has to generate lots of extra code on the off chance that some call or another throws an exception. The vast majority of this code is never, ever used, but it has to be there, bloating the process.

Because of these problems, Swift chose not to support traditional exceptions; instead, it only allows you to throw errors in specially-marked regions of code. But as a corollary, that means that, if something goes really wrong in code that can't throw, all it can really do to prevent a disaster is crash. And currently, the only thing you can crash is the entire process.

For more information, see

• Error Handling Rationale and Proposal

This is the code I use to log all exceptions/errors. Log.error(with:) is a custom function where I store the stack trace, along with other info. Thread.callStackSymbols is an array of strings and represents the stack trace.

func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplicationLaunchOptionsKey: Any]? = nil) -> Bool {

    NSSetUncaughtExceptionHandler { exception in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    signal(SIGABRT) { _ in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    signal(SIGILL) { _ in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    signal(SIGSEGV) { _ in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    signal(SIGFPE) { _ in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    signal(SIGBUS) { _ in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    signal(SIGPIPE) { _ in
        Log.error(with: Thread.callStackSymbols)
    }

    return true
}